Return of the Fat Man

In Reginald Hill’s 2007 novel The Death of Dalziel, Superintendent Andy Dalziel’s huge frame was caught in a terrorist bomb attack. Although he was in a coma and everyone feared for his life, he survived to fight again.

The action in Hill’s latest novel takes place over a day and a night and begins when Dalziel gets a phone call from a Commander Mick Purby of the Met, a colleague he barely knows.

He and the attractive Gina Wolfe are engaged. With marriage on offer, she has come to Mid-Yorkshire to search for her husband Alex Wolfe, also a police officer, who has been missing for seven years, believed dead.

So could the Fat Man, as a favour, find the lost man? Both coppers have been involved with Goldman, a shady entrepreneur who also has a dirty past to conceal but is now anxious to go straight. Goldman has aspirations for his son, believing he could become the first mixed-black Conservative prime minister.

Also in the frame is a radical Welsh journalist who also wants to bring down Goldman for reasons of his own.

All these complicated strands come together when Dalziel invites Gina to a fancy restaurant. Unbeknown to them both, she is being followed by a lethal brother-and-sister team. The boozy lunch leaves Dalziel the worse for wear and unaware that a bug is hidden under their table.

He is then embarrassed when he catches sight of Pascoe across a crowded terrace at a christening party. Surely he won’t think his boss is having a relationship!

The day finally ends at midnight after one of Dalziel’s best cops is seriously hurt and an unknown man is murdered most cruelly, his face shot to ribbons.

Hill is at the height of his powers in this, his 24th novel, as our indomitable pair deal with political and personal corruption.

All his characters grow in depth, particularly Dalziel and Pascoe, who have a “vicarious father/son relationship” based on “mutual respect and even affection, with the residual ability to get up one another’s noses”.

As always, this elegant, finely constructed thriller has you on the edge of your seat until the exciting crescendo.

Appropriately named, Midnight Fugue has music woven into the drama as Hill has games with musical metaphors, introducing each section with a tune and an appropriate heading while Gina the music teacher plays in counterpoint to the Fat Man in this witty, erudite and intricate novel.